Thomas Schwarz Wentzer
Finitude determines the human condition in all its aspects. In fact, everything in the world is limited, exists within boundaries and under certain constraints. Yet the notion of “finitude” is used solely with regard to human existence. This notion does not only express the sum of our limitations or incapability, nor is it just another word for the biological fact of human mortality. It expresses a guise of life that is intelligible only in light of the immanent awareness of its essential limitation. Finitude denotes a mode of being rather than a property of an entity. It is, to use the vocabulary of Heidegger, an existential, not a category.
Christian theology has entered into the discourse of finitude via the contrast to the attributes of divine infinity; human finitude is hence interpreted as the culpability of a life form that depends on divine grace and redemption (Ricoeur 1960). We experience finitude typically as the imperfectability of our capabilities linked to the passionate drive structure that is at the heart of our desires and intentions. There will always remain more to say, to say it appropriately, as there is more to know, to know the truth, and more to be done, to do it well rather than well enough. Philosophical hermeneutics reflects and dwells on these experiences without reference to the metaphysics of divine infinity—the idea of God's ubiquitous justice and eternal truth—or its supplements in modern philosophy—the idea of a progress in history regarding human morality or knowledge—arguing that the finitude of our existence makes us capable of using language, gaining knowledge, and acting responsibly in the first place. In a word: Understanding relies on finitude.
This chapter elaborates and defends the claim according to which philosophical hermeneutics can be understood as a philosophy of human finitude (Marquard 1981). In its different versions from Dilthey to Vattimo, philosophical hermeneutics explores human finitude as the prime condition for our worldly engagements and entitlements in all its aspects. The chapter will deal with finitude regarding the limits of our knowledge and the opaqueness of our mortal existence, elaborating on the event character of historical understanding and experience. Although finitude is a negative term—as Ricoeur (1981, 105) remarks—hermeneutics provides a stance that allows recognizing finitude as an existential resource for, rather than an obstacle to, understanding ourselves and the world.
A basic experience of finitude is expressed in the following passage from Dilthey, who notes in one of his late working papers: “It [our life-course] is always limited by being the determinateness of an individual existence marked by singular states. … Singular existence is individuality. The mode of delimination from within produces suffering and the striving to overcome it. It is the tragedy of finitude as much as the incentive to transcend it” (Dilthey 1979, 244; see also de Mul 2004, 369). This remark exposes finitude as a key motive of human culture and historical development, reflecting individual existence in its social, spatial separation as well as in its mortal, temporal vulnerability. It describes the experience of finitude rather dramatically: the individual suffers from being limited and bound, a suffering that motivates the need to transgress these limits toward personal identity among others within a shared world. Hence, singularity and limitation do not first apply on the level of a person being separated from other persons, but already on the level of individual existence. Isolated lived experiences (“Erlebnisse”) have to be integrated into a course of life via structures, patterns, or “categories of life” by virtue of a transcendental-historical ego that Dilthey conceives as the functional equivalent to the Kantian subject.
Dilthey's relentless efforts toward a Critique of Historical Reason are the document of a lifelong struggle with human finitude. Historical reason must not to be thought of as a mere “complementary” to pure reason with legislative competence solely within the humanities (as Lessing 1986 and notably Makkreel (1975, 4, 334) in his influential study have put it), but as a more profound take on human reason as such. This revised Kantianism is founded on the hermeneutic impulse “to understand life from itself …; thought cannot go back behind life” (Dilthey 1990b, 4–5). Hence, there is no first principle or axiomatic authority different from life, from which life could be explained; life must be understood and interpreted on its own terms. Both interpretans and interpretandum belong to the same ontological domain: Life. Life—“the paragon of what is realized in lived experience and understanding …, the comprehensive connection of humankind” (Dilthey 1979, 131)—marks both the ultimate limit and the true subject of philosophy according to Dilthey.
However, this agenda reveals an ambiguous stance toward finitude. On the one hand, Dilthey acknowledges and even celebrates the historicity of human thought as a tool against unwarranted dogmatism of any kind: “The historical awareness of the finitude of any actual occurrence, of all human or social affairs, of the relativity of any form of faith marks the last step towards the liberation of mankind” (Dilthey 1979, 290). This verdict deserves attention as it does not contrast human finitude to divine infinity that some way or the other serves as a regulative idea or ultimate source to truth, freedom, and justice. Dilthey's “philosophy of worldviews” entails what Vattimo prominently has termed the “nihilistic vocation of hermeneutics” in the narrative of a “weakening of Being” that articulates the proper philosophical stance in the age of nihilism (Vattimo 1997). In this perspective, it is the lack of perfect knowledge and the absence of truth that guarantees human liberation and freedom, not the scientific and ethical progress that enlightenment allegedly provides. On the other hand, Dilthey is convinced that his hermeneutics can reconstruct universal structures of understanding and a quasi-transcendental-historical subjectivity that facilitates such a historical worldview with epistemological means (Dilthey 1979, 191, 218; 1990a, 95; 1990b, 334; 1991, 188 f.). He is couched between his intuitions concerning the “ontology of life” (de Mul 2004, 3) and his obsession to articulate these intuitions following an epistemological, methodological approach. He acknowledges finitude to be the ontological condition of the mundane openness of the human, hence of our freedom (Dilthey 1979, 216, 52). But he remains within the neo-Kantian, epistemological take on such a project, transcending the experience of finitude toward its scientific treatment in (notably) the humanities.
Early Heidegger's hermeneutics of facticity (Heidegger 1988; 2005, 343 ff.) deals with Dilthey's ambition to understand life from itself by taking hermeneutics and interpretation into the very movement of factical life itself. Interpretation does not occur as late as on the level of (scientific) reappropriation of lived experience manifest in traditional documents and texts. Experience is interpretation all the way down, as we in every practical or theoretical comportment relate to the requirements of our being, interpreting the facticity of our existence. The very movement of living a life—however successful or disastrous according to any kind of normative system and indifferent to the degree of an explicit acknowledgment of such norms—is already a way to understand one's existence, no matter in how explicit or philosophically well informed a way this understanding is executed. Factical life is hermeneutic in its own right, prior to any methodological or epistemological reconstruction. This move may at first glance look like a minor adjustment to the hermeneutic entry that now enters the scene already from the very start. But it entails, in fact, a spectacular revision of human subjectivity that altogether alters the discourse of transcendental philosophy, finding its terminological expression in the concept of Dasein (“being-there”). Heidegger's phenomenological analyses of Being and Time consequently dismantle structures of being-in-the-world that show the impossibility of a “subject,” that is, of a self or an ego that could be thought of prior to its interpretative engagement and involvements. The way human beings are—their being-there—is characterized by the fact that humans always already have to cope with their worldly existence. Consequently, the claim that factical life interprets itself via its very way of existing urges phenomenological description to provide an appropriate ontological vocabulary that is able to capture the primordial transcendence of human existence, rather than to rely on the ontology of isolated things (“before-hand”). The concept of care (“Sorge”), notably the analysis of death as “running-ahead” and “being-toward,” renders the ontological structure of Dasein along these lines.
To think of subjectivity in terms of Dasein is therefore to think of human existence in terms of finitude, hence to acknowledge that transcendence—the very capability to establish worldly affairs as a way to project oneself toward one's own existence; in a word: human openness toward Being—is determined from within. The concept of Dasein denotes an event that humans undergo rather than referring to an origin of spontaneous acts they initiate. This “event” is the understanding of Being as the hermeneutic event of factual existence:
Existence as a mode of being is in itself finitude and as such it is possible only on the ground of the understanding of Being. … On the ground of the understanding of Being man is the “there”; due to this being the there the opening break towards the world occurs, so that the world and its entities as such can be given to a self. More primordial than man is the finitude of Dasein within him … . We do not need to ask towards a relation of the understanding of Being to the finitude in the human being. It is itself the innermost essence of finitude.
(Heidegger 1991, 228 f.)
Heidegger hence relates finitude to the understanding of Being, claiming that we have to understand this joint as the event that originates Dasein and hence indicates the essence of man. It is due to the finitude of our Dasein that we undertake intentional worldly affairs; and this fundamental condition must not be thought of as the achievement of a subject, but as the event that Dasein is delivered to. That is to say, finitude is to be taken as an ontological condition instead of indicating merely an ontic fact. It captures our mode of being as openness to worldly existence (as being-with-others) in its ecstatic temporality on the basis of an event that we neither initiate nor control. Humans do not just live; our life is always a task that has to be pursued one way or the other. And, despite all possible choices and adopted patterns of socially sanctioned behavior, nobody can choose their own Dasein. We are “thrown” into our Dasein as an opaque and incomprehensible facticity. Finitude is the ontological condition of freedom, not its abandonment. It releases the human being to its Dasein and marks the essence of human existence (elaborated in Heidegger 1978; 1983). Needless to say, finitude in this sense eliminates any possibility of a transcendental subjectivity; the passage quoted provides the ultimate abandonment of Husserl's idealistic phenomenology.
This line of argument even traverses Heidegger's treatment of mortality and death. He consequently refrains from thinking of finite existence ontically as the limited period of an individual life between birth and death. He thinks of finitude ontologically, presenting death, “the end of Dasein,” as “Dasein's ownmost possibility—non-relational, certain, and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped” (Heidegger 1962, 303). Individual mortality is not conceived as the biological fact that characterizes all organic life, but as the ultimate existential condition that singularizes each Dasein to lead its own life in light of its possibility, rather than its actuality. Following this ontological description, humans are capable of giving meaning to their existence and the course of their life because of their mortality as the possibility of and the projection toward their own death. This argument takes up a challenge famously formulated by Aristotle that Dilthey reformulates in his existential discussion of the hermeneutic circle in understanding the course of life. Meaning, Dilthey holds, is “the special relation between the parts and the whole of our life” (Dilthey 1979, 233). Significance and meaning of a certain episode rely on its relation to the entire life, when a particular moment of the past gains significance owing to its relation to a future present in the same course of life. The problem is that this relation never can be executed totally, as one would be forced to wait for the hour of death in order to survey one's life in its entirety (ibid.). If we adopt the circularity between parts and whole to understand human existence, historical understanding becomes impossible: Grasping the whole is compulsory in order to understand episodic life; its actualization is impossible as its fulfillment simultaneously implies its termination. Heidegger dissolves this apparent paradox in his conception of death as the “possibility of existing as a whole potentiality-for-Being” (“ganzes Seinkönnen”; Heidegger 1962, 309) that provides the ultimate horizon within which occasional episodes gain their significance or insignificance. We exist as finite beings not because we someday—not now—will die, but because of our projection toward the possibility of death that is present—even when suppressed—in every moment of our existence.
Heidegger's hermeneutics of Dasein eventually presents an alternative approach to human freedom. It is conceived not as a kind of causality, based on the autonomy of absolute practical reason or on the freedom of a will in its various conceptions. Freedom is not at all about being a first cause that ensures the subsequent accountability for one's actions, but of responding to the finite existence that one is called upon (see Raffoul 2010).
Whereas hermeneutics according to Heidegger serves as a way to enter into the project of fundamental ontology, Gadamer defends the philosophical significance of hermeneutics in its own right. To Gadamer, regaining the question of Being neither necessitates a transcendental approach akin to Kant (as Being and Time by and large had suggested (Gadamer 1986, 428)), nor does it presuppose the destruction of Western metaphysics back to its Greek origins that Heidegger, especially after the Kehre, had advocated in order to avoid the alleged pitfalls of traditional philosophical discourse and its language. Truth and Method pursues the ontological project within hermeneutics, as an elaboration of the historicity of understanding and its ontological implications, as they are available in reflecting what Gadamer unfolds as hermeneutic experience.
What then is experience according to hermeneutics, and what does “hermeneutic experience” amount to? Gadamer dissolves experience from its scientific, positivist context and recalls its origin in and significance to the life world of our daily living. Drawing on Aristotle, Hegel, and Aeschylus, he enumerates three basic characteristics of human experience: (i) event; (ii) negativity, and (iii) reflexivity (Gadamer 2004, 345 ff.).
The analysis of human experience is of pivotal importance to get right Gadamer's stance between Heidegger's metaphysics of finitude and Hegel's speculative infinity (differently Caputo 2000, 46 ff.; similar Risser 1995). In Gadamer's hermeneutics, experience does not terminate in the universal logos (Aristotle) or the certainty of knowledge (Hegel) that would cut off the process of experience. To be experienced means to be open to the infinite wealth of further experiences, as any experience provides an experience about experience. Experience itself entails insight into the human dependence on experience. This, however, is the insight into the finitude of experience and of the human condition: “Thus experience is the experience of human finitude. … Real experience is that whereby man becomes aware of his finiteness” (Gadamer 2004, 351).
To be aware or conscious of one's finitude means to carry out what Gadamer terms the “historically effected consciousness” (“wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewußtsein”). This “consciousness” denotes a mature stance toward tradition and its heritage that is free to assume the present significance of a document of the past. It is aware of its historical distance, hence of the alterity inherent, but opens itself to the subject matter that might become available owing to interpretation, actualizing, and retrieving the past into a virtual present dialogue. Historically effected consciousness provides hermeneutic experience insofar as it executes its understanding as a dialogue, even if historical distance or the multiplicities of languages seem to preclude the possibility of actual understanding. It reckons that something is said or given that matters to it, that is, that does not only provide (historical) meaning but (actual historic) significance. A person undergoing experience carries on dialogue as the addressee who wants to understand what is said to her. Openness and finitude are hence two sides of the same coin of human experience.
Gadamer's model of the hermeneutic experience provides a special case of the I–thou relation and its actualization in dialogue: “Hermeneutic philosophy does not conceive of itself as an ‘absolute’ position, but as the way of experience. It insists on the fact that there is no higher principle than to keep oneself open to dialogue. This however always implies to acknowledge in advance the possible right, if not the superiority of the interlocutor” (Gadamer 1986, 505). Hermeneutic experience is a “moral phenomenon” (Gadamer 1995, 97 f.; 2004, 352), insofar as it is concerned with the understanding of other persons and their utterances. One finds oneself always already obliged to a kind of ethical commitment that relies on the openness of one's finite existence, as it has become manifest in our rendering of the doctrine of experience. The inherent morality does not follow from the alterity of the Other as such (as in Levinas or Derrida), but on the responsive character of understanding. In the course of Truth and Method, Gadamer has a strong case for this claim, as he shows the actual condition of any textual understanding in the principle of the “fore-conception of completeness” (“Vorgriff der Vollkommenheit”; Gadamer 2004, 294). In light of the analysis of experience, this principle gains ethical significance not as an imperative that we ought to follow owing to our interest in the moral good or owing to the immeasurable integrity of the Other, but because of its factical actuality in our practices of understanding. We already apply this principle, as long as we want to understand the subject at issue at all. So, interpreting a handed-down document means to acknowledge its demand as something that has the right to be heard and understood—not just from a historical distance, but—as a significant partner in the joint fellowship of understanding.
I used the phrase concerning the “responsive character of our understanding,” which may be confusing given the hermeneutic primacy that Gadamer grants to the question. The openness of experience is grounded on the openness of questioning; in the maybe most important section of Truth and Method (355 ff.), Gadamer convincingly explores the dialogical basis of our understanding, indicating the theory of language as medium and horizon of a hermeneutic ontology that is exposed in the concluding third part of the book. To understand a text is to understand the question the text is supposed to provide an answer to. The process of understanding implies that the interpreter not only renders aspects that from the distance of historical perspective might give rise to possible questions, but that she really executes their questioning. Only then does actual understanding result, as the question then has become the question of the interpreter, who is as much addressed and questioned by herself as she is considering the possible answers of the text. In this process, we, the interpreters, put ourselves into the open, as we, courtesy of our questions, probe different possibilities of understanding. Having thus put our pre-understanding at risk, we experience that things could be different. Dialogical understanding that goes through the modalities of questioning can hence be described as ontological experience, as it displays the modal excess of human understanding that always relates to possible being, when understanding reality. Hence, understanding “something as something”—the formal structure of any understanding and thus of intentionality—means to be able also to take something as something different, to experience the freedom of understanding differently, which is the freedom to understand at all. Understanding, then, implies transcendence as the excess of actuality toward possibility. So, Gadamer's hermeneutics is indeed an ontology of the possible (Risser 1995), and it is his doctrine of the hermeneutic primacy of the question that provides its phenomenological foundation (Wentzer 2000; 2011).
But this primacy must not be misunderstood dogmatically, as if it was only the question, and not the answer, that opened understanding and its ontological implications. It has to be balanced dialectically by recalling the responsive element of understanding and dialogue. Phrased in the vocabulary of Being and Time, existence and facticity constitute the movement of Dasein as thrown projection, as hermeneutically situated understanding. The openness of the question and the finitude of the response together establish the dialogue that we are:
The most important thing is the question that the text puts to us, our being perplexed by the traditionary word, so that understanding it must already include the task of the historical self-mediation between the present and tradition. Thus, the relation of question and answer is, in fact, reversed. The voice that speaks to us from the past—whether text, work, trace—itself poses a question and places our meaning in openness. In order to answer the question put to us, we the interrogated must ourselves begin to ask questions.
(Gadamer 2004, 366 f.)
“It [the prompt of interpretation; TSW] is not really a beginning. We saw that the hermeneutical experience always includes the fact that the text to be understood speaks into a situation that is determined by previous opinions. The hermeneutical situation is not a regrettable distortion that affects the purity of understanding, but the condition of its possibility. … Only because the text calls for it does interpretation take place, and only in the way called for. The apparently thetic beginning of interpretation is, in fact, a response; and the sense of an interpretation is determined, like every response, by the question asked. Thus the dialectic of question and answer always precedes the dialectic of interpretation. It is what determines understanding as an event.”
(Gadamer 2004, 467)
These passages entail Gadamer's hermeneutical explication of the event character of human understanding and its finitude that we already encountered in Heidegger. It is bound to the happening of dialogue. The reversed relation between question and answer that Gadamer mentions earlier exhibits, in fact, the very happening of the course of a dialogue. The unity of a dialogue is not constituted by the fact that every question is followed up by a response that again leads to a new question—like pearls on a necklace—but by courtesy of the dialectical inversion of the question being a response in itself and the response being a question. A first question is never a spontaneous beginning, but a response to a certain situation which motivates that the question can occur in the first place. Hence, the questions that we pose in order to understand a text are always responses to its demand (similar Ricoeur 1981, 113 f.). The simple fact of the existence of a text that I come across transforms me into the interpreter who has to respond to this event. Hermeneutics does not have the problem of a beginning (ibid.), as its subject—understanding—is already in place. Interpretation and understanding are characterized by responsiveness; their reality is that of a second word that precludes our grip on the first or the last (Waldenfels 1994, 321; 2007, 53).
In the passages quoted earlier, Gadamer uses the inversion of question and answer to explain the event character of understanding. One may recall the working title of the book he presented to his publisher, which was “Understanding and Event” (“Verstehen und Geschehen”). This title was dismissed as too heavy and finally substituted by “Truth and Method.” Recalling Heidegger's conception of Dasein as the event of the understanding of Being and hence of finitude, we now see in what sense Gadamer is committed to finite thinking. It is, in fact, the experience of concrete otherness—of a person, a text, a piece of art—that induces the hermeneutic entry. Gadamerian hermeneutics is sensitive to the event character of understanding that comes to the fore in every hermeneutic experience, be it the interpretation of a historical document, the encounter of a foreign culture and its language, or the meeting with a cherished person. All these situations are instances of understanding that presuppose alterity and alienness. Understanding is hence not a process of mergence into the indistinguishability of the indiscernible (similar Di Cesare 2009, 272 ff.). It is responsive, comes in return, and projects itself toward meaning in the dialogue that we are.1